


Baku-Ra

by TexasDreamer01



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Dreameater AU, Millennium World, Peri-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 01:32:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5072797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TexasDreamer01/pseuds/TexasDreamer01
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The figurines on his shelf had grown dusty. And, frankly, Ryou had <em>plenty</em> to say about that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baku-Ra

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RabbitPie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RabbitPie/gifts).



> I admit that I'm winging it a bit with how an RPG would actually be _made_ , especially on a scale such as this - D&D is as far as my experience goes, so take the minutiae with a grain of salt if it doesn't match up.

The figurines on his shelf had grown dusty. They were relics of a time he preferred long gone, but the reminders they posed needed to be kept closer to the forefront of his mind. One, in the corner – the spire of a meticulously-carved and painted tower, still bore flecks of blood that he hadn't bothered to clean off. Not that it would have made a difference; by the time everything had... settled down, the paint was already ruined. The game was already ruined.

He sighed, replacing the half-finished woman in his hand back onto the worktable, casting a glance at the first, terribly ruined, RPG gathering memories up on its designated shelf. It could have been such a _good_ game, too. Passing an absent hand over his chest, fingers dragging on the thin fabric obscuring ring and scars both, Ryou hummed a few bars of a half-forgotten sonata his father used to indulge in.

Events were accelerating forward more quickly than he had originally anticipated. It made his arm twinge in thought, remembering the bright sunshine that frequently littered itself on Domino's landscape during the warmer months – blinding him, more. He always preferred winter. At least then he could avoid the glitter of the snow if he so chose, wrap the richest, densest scarf he owned around him until it puddled delicately below his ears. Another gusty sigh; his _tenant_ had insisted that this next game encapsulate the smoky heat of Egypt, and to adjust the board – new, a thick balsa, practically aching for him to cover and shape it with plaster – accordingly.

Battle City had been a rioting whirlwind of colours and shadows and _dreams_ that he had been disappointingly absent for. And his deck, Ryou tsked, had so many additions that he normally would have never approved of. Dueling wasn't much of a pastime of his, no, but he was more than cognizant of the advantages it carried – how fluidly the game moved, revealed so much of each duelist. He curled the tip of his tongue over a canine, stretching a hand out for the tepid mug of tea that was sitting safely out of his work's reach. The sweet aroma filtered into his busy mind, accentuating the twisting thoughts and settling a few favoured ideas into place.

“Ah,” He said into the empty air, vocalization too soft to rustle even the stray lock of hair that clung near his chapped lips. _Mh, need to find the lip balm_ , Ryou thought, casting a contemplative look at the primed table. It was coalescing, _yes_ , he could see it now; a spire there painted and carved with imagery, a cliff there with shallow hand-holds gouging its side... The tea was placed on the counter, slender legs bearing him from his slouching in the aged armchair with a swift rise that matched his growing frenetic thoughts as he circled the table. The Ring jingled as he leant over the table, fabric of his shirt corralling it with a loose grasp to his body. He had learned, early on after moving to Domino, that it would never leave his side had he a choice. It was an acceptable sacrifice – he had also learned the valuable lesson of keeping it closer than his friends.

And keep it close he would. Tracing the eddies and rises of his canvas with fingers scarcely calloused, words strung themselves into order. Oh, oh yes, he would obey his tenant's wishes (demands), but he would do it _his_ way. The memories would not be his own, true, but that was hardly an issue; dreams were dreams, and they could be plucked and tuned as the game necessitated.

Ryou supposed he was lucky – after acquiescing, he was flooded in a wealth of memories, hardly given pause to even voice protest at the deluge. It made him heady, the nooks and crannies of his mind stuffed full of another person's lifetime. There were still things missing, but of course nobody ever truly divulged their dreams; what a shame that was, considering how often it stitched together pertinent memories and gave light to one's goals and wishes in life.

Nevertheless, there was more than enough to work with, and his observations would fill many of the gaps. Tapping a particular point on the board and marking it mentally as the center of the game (slightly off-center, but then delusions of control served better the closer one was to the crux of things, he found), Ryou plucked up a permanent marker from a coffee table that had been recruited for the project, marking the point before briskly annotating what his tenant wanted as major plot points. A grid was sketched on afterwards, loose and varied in structure.

He grabbed a handful of note cards from the smaller table after numbering the major sections. The marker was a brush tip, long usage wearing the nib down to something teetering on the edge of feathering pleasantly and stiff felt; it left a satisfying scrawl of burgundy on the pale wood, which transferred darkly to the slips of paper where he jotted down more notes that corresponded to the numbered grid squares. He alternated between intense writing and flipping the tool in his hand to tap perfunctorily against the smaller of the two tables in a staccato rhythm until another idea barreled upon him. 

The story fleshed itself out in this manner slowly, bits and pieces trawling the skeleton of his borrowed (scarcely even commissioned, he admitted with a snort into his air conditioner-chilled tea) plot to knit themselves to each other. In the crevices did he ply the snatches of realism, pinning it into a more pliable, tangible shape that suited his needs. Ryou let a smirk cut across the pale expanse of his face. To Egypt they would go, but the transportation was his to be decided upon – room had to be made for the game his tenant wanted, plateauing the amount of creative free-will he was allowed to exercise. _Very well_ , he mused, pacing around the work table to the bookcase that was reserved solely for his building supplies. It was a little dusty, though not where it mattered, a variety of clays and paints and inks decorating it in avant-garde abstract. No time for tones or palettes now, a plain, splattered tub of clay was hefted onto the balsa with a dull smack-slide of plastic that he had always found satisfying.

One stage was done, and proceeding to the next would require sustenance. Grumbling under his breath with little pause to drain the last few gulps of his drink, Ryou tugged that ever-present tendril that lurked in the corners of his heart as he lurked in the sunset-shadowed corners of his kitchen in the perpetual quest for nourishment. The response was quick; a curling scowl greeted him as he located a bag of soba and some hearty-looking sauce from a cabinet. It prickled where it was stuck to the inner sides of his skull, settling between brain and protective sheath. He slung a drawer open, withdrawing a pair of scissors to nip a corner off from the soba, bumping it closed with a hip as he fetched a pot.

Each of the steps involved in throwing together a meal were automatic, a glide made elegant only by rote. The patter of dishes and cabinets, the clicking as he adjusted the temperature of the stove top – the mundane melody was his tenant's wake-up call, and long habit forced the satchel of memories from the afternoon in a silent transmission rather than via a lazy babble that most preferred for conversation. Direct, to the point, and Ryou thought a bit quaint for all that the other was prone to rambling monologues at the slightest provocation.

Still, “I don't suppose you were wanting some input on the figurines.”

 _Given_ , rather than received. He was the architect, but rather not the master – of this their roles had been drawn in stone. His skill, his time, was necessary, not any tedious ideas and ideals he would have ordinarily made a point to voice. No matter; what he wanted was already firmly staked out.

A flicker of images overlapped the simmering water in the pot, vibrant and at once tuned to his abilities with wood and clay and paint. Ryou hummed a note of acquiesce, moving to drain the noodles and uncap the bottle to combine the two, committing to memory the details of the various characters that dotted the lengthy to-do list of this game. Some of them gave him pause, tugging him to the stack of notes in order to alter a few of the finer details. Scripts, he would need to revise the scripts of the NPCs. The bottle was shoved into the fridge en route to the bubbling mix of noodles and teriyaki-covered vegetables, to be relegated to later meal planning further on in the week.

He slid the pair of chopsticks that lived in the tin next to the sink into his palm with a quick-fingered movement, each breath catching the memories of sun-drenched heat and each barefoot step upon parquet reminiscent of foreboding sand. Egypt was settling herself in his bones, and it quickened his pulse, ricocheting ideas along the heart-string he shared with his tenant at a pace stumbling faster with a fulfilling mania. The agreements and negotiations (and re-negotiations; Ryou knew which lines were sand, which were stone) were made faster than he could shovel down his dinner. The bowl was nearly dropped into the sink, its rattling as it settled adding to the chaos echoing in his ears as he flicked the top of the clay – tossed into a corner he would figure out later – and shoving a hand in to scoop out a rough glop of the cool material.

The next hours were spent in a blur, hazy around the edges as if flooded in adrenaline but in the most pleasant of ways; every time he surfaced, the balsa had more patches covered with fingerprinted, grey clay in crude shapes that alluded to the upcoming game. A rough shape began to emerge; a nascent biome crafted specifically for his- _their_ purposes, allowances preemptively made for the superficial cosmetics.

It felt like marathoning a swim, all deep gulps and frantic movement – only in this case it was pages of scrap paper tested for colours, a messy bowl of plaster colluding with rolls of paper and gauze alternating (that managed to splatter itself up to his elbows in messy flicks) and harmonizing with future plans for wide brush strokes of colourful base coats. Constructing the background of the playing field was ugly, off-putting work, not suited for the final elegance that players enjoyed without a hint as to the labour that produced their entertainment. Ryou revelled in it.

His tenant had long since petered off to brood and plot in veritable solitude. That was fine by him; there was plenty of time now to weave and sneak and scrape where plaster would cover. The tatters of his first game loomed on the bookshelf in an omnipresent reminder to ferret away his victories from the Goliath that soaked into every last spare corner his mind and heart had, ostensibly an omniscient presence.

So he whiled away the hours, scalpel poised with a calligrapher's touch to decorate the drying clay in sigils and lines, magic and heartbeat reverberating in the forms that his family had coveted for generations. Laying strips of plaster nearly as quickly as the lines were drawn (and hah, would _he_ be pleased at the quick pace), Ryou managed to hide his mischief with creative bandages and the first coats of colourful paint. Mentally tabulating the marks he would need to make for each of the game pieces – and oh, did he know the allotted cheats for the Game Master and opponent each – the last tendrils of dreams were rested in the bowels of the plot.

The next few weeks would be the final touches. Scenes, scripts – those were minor technicalities, superfluous and adaptable. He would sleep on it, cement his work, and the longer he took then the better all this would turn out. Ryou cast a fond glance at the results of his work, tacky fingers curling contentedly around the mug of tea that had apparently been made between bouts of sculpting. A touch of smugness leaked through, though, but he could hardly blame himself for it. Where his tenant preferred swooping gestures that toppled cities, he preferred the subtleties of nightly convalescence; those could be nudged with little touches, unnoticed except for those who knew where to look. 

And as much as he could sympathize with his tenant's dreams (and he _could_ , really, dreams were still dreams no matter how much they ached to shake the earth with their magnitude), the goals of the other were not his. Gambling with such flashy things just wasn't his style, but tipping the delicate balance of the world never curried his sympathies, most especially not when they upset the steady flow of dreams that sustained certain proclivities of his. The figurines on his shelf had grown dusty, and _that_ game was going to have its score settled soon enough.


End file.
